Academic Quackery Bubble Pops... At Least One Does

Academics reeling as market discipline comes to the University of Wisconsin

Very interesting, RTWT.

I'm hoping that this spreads rapidly.

Professor: Academic Rigor = Bad.

Prof: Academic rigor reinforces 'power and privilege'

Suggested Subtitle: I'm too lazy and stupid for actual academic rigor, so I don't reap the rewards that those who actually are rigorous get, so they must stop being rigorous, amirite? And BTW I don't do math or empiricism, I do feminist, Foucaultian destructive criticism which gets me published in non-engineering feminist journals.

The leader of Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education recently declared that academic “rigor” reinforces “white male heterosexual privilege.”

Donna Riley, who previously taught engineering at Smith College for 13 years, published an article in the most recent issue of the journal Engineering Education, arguing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.”

"Scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing."

Defining rigor as “the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality,” Riley asserts that “rigor is used to maintain disciplinary boundaries, with exclusionary implications for marginalized groups and marginalized ways of knowing.”

Engineering Education is a discipline??? No freaking wonder she can't do engineering, and finds it threatening: quality in engineering is too hard for her and "genders, races" and thus it succeeds over those, which appears colonizing.

This is a blatant admission of technical inability cum SJW totalitarianism, focused on destruction of something they cannot understand much less dominate.

Again, what the hell is "engineering education" anyway? And don't forget this wonderful diktat:

"Scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing."

This is a marker for ideological insanity. In fact, take a look at Prof. Riley's published papers (I've bolded the pertinent info):

Selected Publications

Riley, D., Pawley, A., Tucker, J., and Catalano, G.D. "Feminisms in Engineering Education: Transformative Possibilities." National Women's Studies Association Journal, (August 2009).

Riley, D. Engineering and Social Justice. San Rafael, CA: Morgan and Claypool (2008).

Riley, D. and Sciarra, G.L. "'You're all a bunch of fucking feminists': Addressing the Perceived Conflict Between Gender and Professional Identities Using the Montreal Massacre." Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, October 28–31, San Diego, CA (2006).

Riley, D. M., and Claris, L. "Power/Knowledge: Using Foucault to promote critical understandings of content and pedagogy in engineering thermodynamics." ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, June 18 - 21, Chicago, IL (2006).

Riley, D. and Armstrong, E. "Common Ground: How a course collaboration between engineering and women's studies produced fine art." ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, June 12-15, Portland, OR (2005).

Chesler, N. and Riley, D. "The Art of Engineering: Using fine arts to discuss the lives of women faculty in engineering." ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, June 20-23, Salt Lake City, Utah (2004).

Riley, D. "Employing Liberative Pedagogies in Engineering Education." Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 9(2): 137-158 (2003).

Riley, D. "Sex, Fear and Condescension on Campus: Cybercensorship at Carnegie Mellon University." Wired_Women: Gender and new realities in cyberspace. L. Cherney and E.R. Weise, eds. Seattle: Seal Press, 1996.

This illuminates and explains her approach to "engineering education":

She claims that rigor can “reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies in engineering, and maintain invisibility of queer, disabled, low-income, and other marginalized engineering students,” adding that “decades of ethnographic research document a climate of microaggressions and cultures of whiteness and masculinity in engineering.”

She evens contends that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing,” asserting that in the field of engineering, there is an “inherent masculinist, white, and global North bias...all under a guise of neutrality.”

[RELATED: Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate white privilege]

To fight this, Riley calls for engineering programs to “do away with” the notion of academic rigor completely, saying, “This is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

“We need these other ways of knowing to critique rigor, and to find a place to start to build a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education,” she concludes.